Courtney Love: On music, dieting, and why Vancouver is boring

Courtney Love attends An Evening With Women, in Los Angeles. Love will perform Monday, July 22 at Vancouver’s Commodore Ballroom.

Photographed by:Handout, Files

Easily the most polarizing personality in rock, Courtney Love nonetheless deserves some credit.

As frontwoman for Hole, she created some of the most boundary-pushing music of the alt-rock ’90s. Despite being a famous rock widow, she’s yet to sell out the legacy of her late husband, Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain (or so she would say).

And as a woman, she’s never been afraid to speak her mind, even if it means at times coming across as the world’s most lucid train wreck.

Now, with a memoir reportedly on the way as well as a new album (and, according to some reports, a reality TV series – though we’ll believe it when we see it), Love is on tour to promote, well, Courtney.

The Vancouver Sun talked to Love the day after her 48th birthday. She plays the Commodore Ballroom on Monday.

Q: Happy belated birthday, by the way. What did you do?

A: Thanks. I went out with the man I’m dating. We went to The Met (art gallery) and the Carlyle (hotel, both in New York City) and then I went to record and work, and then I went out with my band, and my friend threw a party for me at the Electric Room, which I left really, really early. No cake because I’m on a diet. I have to walk in a runway show in Milan and my weight — I’m fine for rock but I’m a little chunky for fashion. I don’t eat that much but sometimes late at night I really have to have a grilled cheese sandwich. I drink a lot of coconut juice. I’m not really in this L.A. space where I want to do a raw diet thing. And I’m not exercising much at all. It was really quite a miracle when I went to the doctor. He called me in shock and said, “You have the lungs of a 28-year-old.” I said, a 28-year-old smoker? “No, a non-smoker.” And I was like, Wow. And my liver — I mean, I never drank, but I did a lot of other stuff. He was shocked. My liver enzymes were above normal in a positive way. I guess that’s something I find in common with a lot of people who do rock for a living. You have to have a really sturdy body.

Q: You’re not doing any new songs on this tour, are you?

A: This is supposed to be about a single we were going to release. But I feel like since (publisher) HarperCollins is making this (memoir) a big Christmas book, that we should release the single at Christmas. Which may seem like a long way away but the fact is that it has a much larger guarantee of success. There’s only been four alternative rock kind of, if you will, hits in the United States in the last year — QOTSA (note: she actually said “QOTSA”, not “Queens of the Stone Age”), Vampire Weekend, Fallout Boy, and one other one I can’t remember, three are on the same label. The majors have called me but what the hell do the majors want with me? They’re not going to spend any money. I’m not Hova (Jay-Z) and I’m not going to be delivering you millions and millions of kids on my Samsung mobile empire thing. The answer to your question is, I would love to be playing new material, but we aren’t. We’re looking at really deep cuts like Jennifer’s Body and How Dirty Girls Get Clean, songs I haven’t played for a thousand years, if at all.

Q: Do you recall being in Vancouver, making a film? I think you were robbed ...

A: (The movie) was called Trapped, with Charlize Theron. We were filming in 2001. Yeah, I got robbed. The whole set got robbed, actually. Charlize lost a Rolex. Kirsten Dunst had been living (in Vancouver) for four films in a row and, no offence to your fair city ’cause it’s great, but she was so bored that she was out of her mind. You can’t just go to Vancouver and make four films in a row and live in that penthouse. There are these four buildings they put actors in, and I had a penthouse, Charlize had one, Kirsten had one, and Ashton Kutcher had one. At the time Ashton Kutcher was desperately trying to make me do a cameo in some movie called The Boss’s Daughter (2003) and I was like, ‘It’s never going to happen.’ But it’s a good town for, you know, prostitution ...

Q: Well, we do take pride in our prostitutes ...

A: ... um, heroin ... and doing shows. White Lung is from there. That band White Lung. I like White Lung.

Q: How did you come across them?

A: ’Cause they’re chicks. If you’re a band with a chick, I don’t care — Adele sent me her first demo. I sent it at the time to Perez Hilton, who had a lot of power at the time, and within a few weeks they’d re-recorded this song and it was No. 2 in the U.K. Crazy. I don’t even know if Adele knows that. It’s not like we hang out. But (White Lung) sent me their thing. It’s cute. They’re good. It’s punk.

Q: What rock memoirs have you enjoyed?

A: The book I really like a lot is Russell Brand’s My Booky Wook, in terms of tone and texture. This isn’t (Patti Smith’s) Just Kids — that’s a story, she wrote that herself. I have a co-writer. It’s kind of a different deal. It’s not cheap. There are salacious bits but there’s no kiss and tell, per se. Yeah, you can find out about Johnny Depp giving me CPR. But I’ve left out who I’ve slept with per se unless it’s a public thing everybody knows ’cause it’s a guy-tattle or maybe gets progeny out of it. I kind of come off like the Virgin Mary in that department but certainly not other departments. But there are a lot of high-end things because people seem to think I came from a trailer or something. My mother was so enormously wealthy it wasn’t funny. I was sent to shitty boarding schools and then juvenile system in Oregon while my mother was out spending $8 million, which is about 32 million by today’s inflation index. But it wasn’t so bad.